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Summary Of Emily Yoffe's Essay Seeking

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The Granddaddy of Systems In the essay titled "Seeking", Emily Yoffe explains how humans are dependent on finding information. In her thesis, Yoffe states, "We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble… We search for information we don't even care about" (“Seeking” 572). She begins her essay by citing a research study done by psychologist James Olds. In his study, he placed an electric probe in rats' hypothalamus on accident and the rats would shock themselves until they collapsed. "Olds like everyone else, assumed he had found the pleasure center (some scientists still think so)" (Yoffe “Seeking” 573). Yoffe then gives her reader two different ways of explaining what she believes the study actually found by using the words of Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, and Kent Berridge, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Pansksepp who has "Spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals" (“Seeking” 573) tries to explain the study as a single word. "It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for… He finally settled on seeking" (Yoffe “Seeking” 573). Panksepp describes seeking as "The granddaddy of the systems" (qtd. by …show more content…

Yoffe did convince me seeking is a real problem, which can make members of society neglect things in their lives. When Yoffe states "We resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain" (“Seeking” 572) I was hooked on her essay because not only did she compare the reader to rats, she piques the reader's interest by making them want to learn more about these rats. She convinced me by stating, "We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble" (Yoffe “Seeking”

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